36 I ( V') '- .. \ : /" - c., You'll love Ella. She's mtnd-boggltng." . stands between some boxes of film for his four cameras and a framed eight- by-ten color photograph, taken fron- tally, of Michael wearing nothing. Seven different recordings of "The Magic Flute" are piled beside the stereo, including one, conducted by T oscanIni, that he paid forty dollars for the week before and says is aw- ful-"It sounds as if it were recorded by his mother." Among many books scattered around are Susan Sontag's "On Photography," a biography of Samuel Pepys, the catalogue of a Cézanne show at the l\iluseum of Mod- ern Art, a W odehouse novel, and "Collected Shorter Poems of W. H. Auden," which falls readily open at page 276-a poem called "Metalogue to the Magic Flute," which Hockney likes reading aloud, In an accent of broad Yorkshire tinged now and then by Manhattan Close at hand are a stopwatch, for timing the scenes, and a Panasonic electric pencil sharpener. Under the table supporting the model stage are numerous big art books, in which, browsing, he finds inspiration in details from VenetIan and Florentine paintings-for example, some rocks in . a work by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Medici Chapel, Florence, which have helped him with the landscape in Act I where the Queen of Night appears. However, It is a Kool cigarette ad in Rolling Stone which has influenced the waterfalls in the flood scene of the "Flute." Hockney doesn't underesti- mate his audience's..intelligence, and he thinks that one or two people at Glynde- bourne, given a moment to reflect, may look at the cascades and say to them- selves, "Golly, menthol green." He dips the brush in the water and dries it on a cloth. He puts it in a jar, hairs up. He then takes a fatter one. "DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE" H aCKNEY was sitting next to John Cox, the Glyndebourne director of production, at the opening night a few years ago of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress," for which Hockney had done the sets and costumes, when Cox-at once passing the time during a scene change and making his move be- fore a standing ovation and curtain call came for the designer-saId, "Fancy doing another one? " Cox was aware that Hockney was probably Britain's most successful artist, whose pictures fetched higher prices than those of any other living British painter, and that Glyndebourne, in terms of money, paid peanuts. How- ever, he also knew that Hockney was opera-crazy. He plays opera records while painting and opera cassettes while driving, often matching the music to the landscape (Offenbach while enter- ing Paris, "Tannhäuser" while driving through the Alps). HitchhIkers, whom he frequently picks up, are to be seen getting out of the back of hIs BMW, where they have been sitting between the speakers, with their hands over their ears and their heads presumably ring- ing. Cox felt that Hockney was the nght person for "The Magic Flute." The opera has "a combination of light- ness, magic, and idealism," Cox says. "It has in it a belief in the perfectibil- ity of man and the worthwhileness of striving for it. David moans quite a lot about our failures to get somewhere, and that only proves he believes it's possible. " Hockney (who said yes on the spot) did his homework. He went to Salz- burg to visit the Mozart museum and to see a marionette version of the opera. In the British Museum reading room, he read up on eighteenth-century Free- masonry. (The libretto often alludes to Freemasonry's then liberal doctrines and to its struggles with clericalism and Hapsburg power.) The opera is set in ancient Egypt, and Hockney looked into eighteenth-century Egyp- tology and some of its misconceptions. He found in Vienna an engraving of the period which showed five pyramIds at Giza instead of three. He decided to use the traditional legerdemain of flying scenery-drop curtains-which most stage designers consider old-fashioned, but which strikes him as exciting. And then he decided to paint the scenery in N ew York, a city at first glance neither very Egyptian nor very eighteenth-cen- tury, although-as he is quick to tell you-Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of other Mozart operas, eventually be- came a professor at Columbia U niver- sity. (Karl Ludwig Gieseke, one of the two librettists of "The Magic Flute," was made professor of mIneralogy and chemistry in Dublin. ) MaNEY H aCKNEY used to be considered quite nonchalant about money, even when he was poor. These days, he says, "I never fee] rich at all, but I don't feel skint, either." He thinks of himself as a gypsy, a perpetual art studen t- though one who now possesses a more